The Memorial Day weekend once again signals our Summer Vacation Postcard Contest. The goal remains the same: We’ll try to get a postcard from all 50 states (and the District of Columbia) before Labor Day. Send those cards to me at:

The Augusta Chronicle

P.O. Box 1928

Augusta, GA 30901.

Think of it as a way to let your friends and neighbors back home know how things are going wherever you went. I have confidence you will achieve this goal because … you always do.

We’ll even make a contest of the contest, giving recognition for such categories as Biggest Card, Funniest Card, Card Sent from Farthest Away. We’ll judge the various categories – animals, statues, baseball parks (my favorite), restaurants – and see how many of you go to the beach or head for the mountains. As always, if you include a return address on your postcard, I’ll send you one from my vacation.

Some tips:

Extra credit for the hard-to-get states: Believe it or not, many of you do not go to Delaware, New Jersey, Vermont, New Hampshire, Arkansas or Indiana. Maybe we could get them out of the way early.

Write carefully: You’re on vacation and relaxed, but we don’t want mistakes to happen because your name is illegible. I regret to inform you that several times I’ve reported the wrong people on honeymoons. (And once I mistook the gender.)

Be discreet: If you’re slipping off with someone and you don’t want everyone to know it, be careful about using your real name. I have been served court papers to testify in a divorce proceeding over such issues.

Finally, if you want to make a challenge out of this, you have last year’s fine example set by Dick McCoppin, of Augusta, who traveled 6,082 miles, visited 23 states and sent 23 cards. Joe and Lorinda Fournier, of Evans, sent 18 postcards depicting the amazing diversity of America, everything from baseball parks to national parks. And Russell and Sheryl Pate, of Wadley, Ga., sent 14 cards from their summer travels.

On behalf of myself and the U.S. Postal Service, thank you.

TODAY’S TOURIST JOKE:Billy Cooper, of North Augusta, shares this one.

Visitors to a museum passed an exhibit of dinosaur bones, and one asked the guard: “Can you tell me how old those bones are?”

“They are 3 million, four years, and six months old,” said the guard.

“That’s an awfully precise number, said the tourist. “How do you know?”

“Well,” he said, “the bones were 3 million years old when I started working here, and that was four and a half years ago.”